Beats By Dr Dre Seen Often On Olympic Divers

Beats By Dr Dre headphones were seen on a large number of Olympic athletes in 2012. It is one of the most effective marketing moves I've seen, made more remarkable by the fact that the company is not an official sponsor of the Olympics. One reason this is so amazing is that there is an International Olympic rule that says athletes aren't supposed to promote products that are not "official" sponsors. But Dr. Dre handed out bunches of his Studio versions to the athletes, even creating a special version in Great Britain's colors and Union Jack design.

As a result, a lot of athletes, most visibly (on American network TV coverage anyway) divers, openly wore their headphones, which offer active noise-cancellation, in between events to help them focus. Several prominent athletes, such as Team GB's football goal keeper, Jack Butland, and tennis silver-medalist (mixed doubles with Andy Murray), tweeted about how much they loved their Beats, a clear violation of Olympic Rule 40.

Even without knowing about the Dr. Dre campaign, I started posting about divers, Kristian Ipsen, Katie Bell, and swimmers, Anthony Ervin and Sun Yang wearing the Beats between dives and swims. Most recently I've also spotted them on more divers - American, David Boudia and Brit, Tom Daley. It seems that divers were either most fond of them, or (much more likely:)), the noise in the diving venue made use of noise-cancelling headphones more useful.